We're All In Recovery From Western Civilization

We can't consume away out of our collective illness, no matter how hard we try.

I stole the title of this letter from the book Wild Mind by Bill Plotkin.

I've been reading Plotkin's material religiously (and will be spending time with him personally in a few weeks) because it speaks to a wretched feeling I've been harboring in my soul for some time.

My life has expanded in many ways over the past couple of years.

People are coming to me for all types of advice on coaching, running retreats, leadership, life, health, and the like.

It's all very cool.

Humbling.

Something I spent years dreaming of being able to do.

But with followers, likes, cash, and power has come a certain disillusionment.

I find myself increasingly scrutinizing not only my own lifestyle and work but also those of my contemporaries.

All I see is sickness in everyone around me.

I see coaches, leaders, and creators with massive distortions speaking from a place of feigned authority and experience.

I see these same people seeking virality over integrity, cash over humanity, and claiming to be renegades while being the most oblivious conformists in the world.

I see the ways I have done this myself.

I see the further fracturing of our collective humanity, where 40% of our waking hours are spent staring at a piece of glowing glass, filling our minds with the propaganda required to keep the machine alive while claiming how "freethinking" we are.

In a world of sixty-second videos and overnight deliveries, we've taken what makes us human—thoughts, language, and ideas—and squeezed it into the consume-at-all-costs Western zeitgeist.

I am not hopeful for our collective future.

How could you be?

If you really allow yourself to feel all of it—the immensity of where we are culturally, ecologically, and spiritually—the only thing left to be is devastated.

I'm allowing myself to be utterly devastated.

To grieve.

To wail.

To lament.

I know I'm not alone.

I know because the dozens of men I talk to every week are carrying such grief.

Clawing, scratching, fighting their way to a life of significance and meaning in the same ways I have.

Consuming with the desire to consume more, then numbing themselves into oblivion when the consumption doesn't quite scratch the itch.

I don't judge them.

To avoid numbing in a society built to traumatize us is a Herculean task.

I'm understanding this deep, ancient grief and the longing for something real that accompanies it isn't something we work through on the path—it is the path.

You want to be a leader?

Start in recovery.

Allow yourself to be dismembered by the realization that everything you've been brought up around is the reason the world is so messed up.

Face the reality that this society and everyone around you failed you, and the cost is greater than you'll ever be able to comprehend.

Until you choose to go on this descent—to the dark recesses of your soul and psyche—you are not a contributing member of Earth.

You have little to offer the world outside of playing the childish game you don't even remember signing up for.

You can keep playing and never have to grow up or leave home, and probably carve out a pretty decent (albeit materialistic) life...

But you will never, as Plotkin says, embark upon the hazardous journeys of initiation that lead to an existence that's life-enhancing, meaningful, and fulfilling.